Just a comment here copyrights and “fair use”. As I offer more patterns of the “PDF” variety, I am dismayed to see how many times a PDF pattern will be downloaded by the same purchaser. Yes – I can see that! I know what you are doing!
Now I understand that things go wrong with the printer and sometimes it needs to be printed again… but 7 times…. that really leads me to believe that some unauthorized sharing (ie: copyright infringement) is going on.
Please remember that we designers work very hard to come up with fresh, creative ideas and accurate patterns to support them. Usually, we have made several variations of the item just to be sure we know what we are doing.
So if I have made 2 queen size renditions of a quilt, my material costs alone are a minimum of $600 not to mention the value of my time.I long-arm my own stuff – that’s at least a day of work, usually a week. I sit in front of a computer for days to write a pattern using a computer program that costs about $1200. Then if I choose to, I put a PDF version out on my website that cost money to maintain. At the very least, I put the pattern out there to be purchased in a “pre-printed, packaged and mailed” format.
It can take a long time to even recoup the cost of “creating” much less begin to make a profit on a pattern. And every time someone copies a pattern to “share with a friend”, it is theft, money taken right out of the designer’s hand. Yeah, I said it – it is stealing the pattern, like shop-lifting…. And every time someone accepts a “copied” pattern, it is the same thing…
Please respect the rules of commerce – I am trying to buy groceries here!
